1/07/2011 @ 9:00AM

Decriminalizing the Sex Trade

On the surface, Taipei works like any other Asian city. Bar girls snuggle up to men who buy them drinks. At nightclubs hidden inside high-rise apartment complexes, men make private deals for sex with the hostesses. Massage parlors, in their own words, offer “more” than service for sore backs. In the older sections of town, women discreetly solicit men for sex, trading 15 minutes for US$30.

What sets Taipei apart from, say, Beijing or Hong Kong (though not Singapore, where prostitution is legal, though severely restricted) is that the government is legalizing the sex trade instead of squelching it. Taiwan will formally decriminalize prostitution in November, but it will be legal only in certain areas. Officials are now studying where those areas should be; one proposal would allow studio-style brothels in parts of Taipei. The explanation for this move to live and let live: The world’s oldest profession happens to be one of Taiwan’s best organized.

After officials began to tighten a noose around prostitution after more than five decades of hush-hush permissiveness, defiant professionals formed the Collective of Sex Workers and Supporters in 1998 to defend it. Some of the members knew no other career and didn’t want to switch in their 40s or 50s. Others ran profitable nightclubs and sought to protect their livelihood. Based in a narrow Taipei alley that once bustled with brothels, the nonprofit wields surprising clout for a group with just 71 members. It has demonstrated loudly outside cabinet offices and Taipei’s city hall for looser rules. Its protesters followed then president Chen Shui-bian around “like a shadow,” to quote the group’s secretary general. The collective once ran a candidate for city council, winning 443 votes but not enough for the seat.

The collective, billed as a women’s rights group, not only wants prostitution legalized. It also demands safe zones for soliciting customers and safe rooms for sex, both without police surveillance. “The government’s position is always passive, and if you don’t push, nothing happens,” says Wang Fang-ping, the secretary general, speaking with the angry edge of an activist for a tough cause. “We push not just to change policies, but also to change the views of normal citizens. What we are doing is a revolution.”

Wang, 45, is the movement’s rudder. She’s a no-nonsense former trade union general secretary with a lifelong soft spot for women’s struggles in male-dominated Taiwan. In 2002 she was drawn to the collective’s cause as Taiwan’s estimated 80,000 sex workers were suffering some of their worst setbacks after thriving in the early 1990s. “I can understand women of weak status,” she says, citing her mother’s limited prospects. “I also deeply respect workers and realize the power of organization to improve their destiny.” Wang’s 12-hour days of calls, letters and attendance at pivotal events have brought sex workers from the brink of extinction to the bargaining table. “I know the collective as a group of concerned citizens with a strong voice on the topic,” says cabinet spokesman Johnny Chiang.

The topic was thrust into the spotlight in the late 1990s. Chen, then Taipei’s mayor, ordered brothels shut down to throttle the sex trade and remind Taiwan of his opposition-party credentials. The rival Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) had winked and nodded at prostitution in one form or another since taking power in the 1940s. Chen upped the pressure as head of state from 2000 to 2008. The collective says 20,000 sex workers were punished under Taiwan’s “social order maintenance” rules over the ten years ending in 2008.

In mid-2009 the group scored a major point under the new Nationalist government. Shaken by the suicide of a famous prostitute and heavily lobbied by the collective, officials announced that in 2011 sex for money would be legal for both seller and customer. Today prostitutes are fined up to roughly $1,000, but clients walk. Exactly where the sex trade will be legalfor example, how close to schoolsis under study. In October an interior ministry task force floated the idea of permitting studio brothels operated by just three to five sex workers, meaning no pimps or publicity, the two elements most likely to upset conservative citizens. Whether the ministry goes ahead with that or takes other steps to support sex work needs a “human rights” review, says Hsieh Chong-yin, secretary in the ministry’s Department of Social Affairs. “This topic is sensitive and there are numerous differences of opinion.”

“Sensitive” is putting things mildly. Religious groups say the sex trade attracts locals who are too poor to escape it. It lures illegal immigrants from China and Southeast Asia, they charge. Despite the crackdown by Chen, some 10,500 mainland Chinese were caught working in Taiwan’s sex trade between 2001 and 2007, immigration agency statistics show, and about 2,200 came illegally. The collective’s arch-opponent, the Garden of Hope Foundation, advocates fining customers of prostitution as a way to kill off the trade. “The women are forced to rely on prostitution to make money, and it has always been that way. Their respect and health are being hurt,” says Chi Hui-jung, the foundation’s chief executive. She pledged to fight the collective over studio brothels. “The government is just floating a trial balloon,” she speculates.

But Taiwan’s debate goes beyond sex work. A lack of applicable zoning laws would make it hard to control the locations of any studio brothels or safe solicitation zones. Inconsistent law enforcement also troubles the trade. Police prey on lone streetwalkers while taking bribes from pimps to protect the prostitutes who work for underground brothels, the collective charges. And the 23-million-population island dominated by ethnic Chinese must figure out how to balance the old Asian tradition of allowing a low-profile sex trade against a revival of strict, 2,500-year-old Confucian moral values plus 60 years of U.S. influence, including American religious movements’. “There is no globally valid debate on prostitution,” says Stephen Lakkis, head of the human rights and public policy directorate at Taiwan Theological College’s Center for Public Theology. But he fears that permits for small, scattered brothels may mean “hiding away the abuses that may be occurring in those studios.”

The only abuses are police stings, insists Taipei prostitute Nadia Hsieh, a steady supporter of the sex worker collective. She joined the trade three years ago after a divorce left her with a bank debt and two children. “Sex work is safe. I have my health and dignity,” says the 40-year-old sole proprietor with a studio in a dense older section of town that’s packed with colorful back alleys and popular with intrepid tourists. She’s been detained twice and says police know where she meets clients. The job earns an average of $2,580 a month. In her little spare time, she twice put on a face mask to hide her identity and joined the collective in demonstrating against the government. “I really hope the trade can be legal,” says the sex worker, who dressed for an interview in a light coat, jeans and sports shoes like many women in Taipei. “I mean, if two people want to do it, they should be able to. In my area, they bust people whether they’re prostitutes or not. Police say we’re pursuing clients, but the clients come to us.”

Sex workers may not get their pimpless, cop-free safe zones anytime soon. Even after this year’s move to decriminalize, police could nab prostitutes until rules on solicitation and zoning become clearer. The collective vows to keep up its splashy protests until things change. “Of course we’ll keep on working hard at this goal,” says Wang. “As long as sex workers have the energy to struggle, we won’t change course.”